by Craig Dirkes
Taylor took the lead as we followed her onto a narrow trail through a patch of dead grass. Just ahead of us, five boats glided across the Kuskokwim.
“Which one of those boats is Joey’s?” I asked. “And who is he, anyway?”
“He goes to high school with us,” Taylor said ahead of me, stepping onto the sandy shoreline. “But he doesn’t have a boat.”
The rest of us joined Taylor on the shoreline. Bristy pointed to an area fifty yards to our right, near what looked like a boat launch. “There he is,” she said.
Through a cloud of gnats backlit by the sunshine, I saw a dude our age off-loading dogs from the back of an old white pickup truck. Taylor ran toward him and left us behind. I wondered, jealously, why she seemed so excited to see him.
I hung back with Bristy and Hope and walked in between them. Once Taylor was out of earshot, I asked the girls, “Are you two high?”
Bristy’s eyes went wide. She punched me in the arm and said, “Don’t even say that!”
“What about that night?” I asked, keeping an eye on Taylor to see what would happen when she reached Joey. “Why can’t Taylor know you guys smoke weed?”
Hope tongued the hoop through her lip and gave me a hard look. “Basically,” she said, “Taylor doesn’t have room in her life for any extra bullshit. She doesn’t want to be associated with friends who party, because her parents are teachers. It’s a small town and word travels. She caught us smoking weed a year ago and practically disowned us.”
“Well, you’re both acting high,” I said. “The Chilean whatever wasn’t that funny.”
“Drop it, Eddie,” Bristy said. “And don’t go saying anything to Taylor. Even though she’s probably freaking about nothing, we don’t want to get into trouble with her. We’ve been best friends since kindergarten.”
Then, thirty yards ahead, Taylor jumped up into the air and reached for Joey. He caught her and swung her around in a circle, like a military husband reunited with his wife.
My first knee-jerk thought: I’d like to kick that kid’s ass right now.
Joey, wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt, looked like a more muscular version of Finn, and he was probably stronger than me because I’d barely worked out since I moved to Kusko. There was no gym other than the one in the high school. All I’d been able to do was pushups, and some curls with a five-gallon bucket of water.
I saw red, and I knew Bristy and Hope could tell.
Hope grabbed my hand to get my attention. “He’s her second cousin, you fucking spaz.”
Phew, I thought. Thank God.
“I couldn’t care less,” I said.
“Whatever, Eddie,” Bristy said.
I walked through a crowd of eight sled dogs, brushing my knees against their sides. I inadvertently stomped on a gangline resting beneath the dogs’ feet just as Joey tossed a tangled pile of harnesses onto the ground.
Taylor took a step back so that I could shake Joey’s hand. “What gives?” I asked him. “Dry-land mushing on the beach is a cool idea, but where’s the sled?”
Joey smiled. “I’m not mushing. I’m wakeboarding.”
Now I get it, I thought. That’s badass.
Joey pulled a wet suit from the bed of his truck and changed into it behind the driver’s-side door, shielding himself from the girls, who stood on the outskirts of the dogs.
The girls got to work harnessing the dogs, without being asked. “Thanks for the help,” Joey said, watching them through the door window as he changed.
I grabbed the dog closest to me — a mocha-colored mutt with black patches — and began fitting his harness. I was impressed not only that the girls knew how to harness dogs, but that they were so good at it — especially Hope, who was doing it faster than me.
“You know how to do this?” I asked them.
“We’re Alaskans, dumbass,” Hope said.
I laughed, but nobody else did.
A minute later, Joey spread the gangline onto the beach, ten feet from the mucky brown water. The girls and I attached the dogs to the gangline while Joey hooked a long rope onto the back of it. He grabbed the rope and the wakeboard and hiked down the shoreline until the rope was taut, thirty feet behind the team. The girls and I knelt down and petted the dogs to occupy them.
Joey waded twenty feet into the water, waist-deep, hauling the rope handle and wakeboard with him. He half hollered, “Someone needs to drive my truck and trail us down the beach.”
“I will,” Taylor replied.
Joey sunk into the water up to his shoulders to fit the wakeboard onto his feet, the rope handle floating just in front of his face. He grabbed the rope handle and balanced himself in the water, lying back slightly, with the tip of the wakeboard peeking above the river’s surface.
“Hike!” Joey shouted.
The dogs lunged forward, fighting against the weight of Joey and the resistance of the wakeboard plowing through the water. Ten seconds later, the dogs hit full stride and Joey was upright. The girls and I whooped and cheered as Joey sailed past us, the dogs kicking up sand as they barreled down the shoreline.
With one hand holding the rope, Joey waved and shouted, “Drive, Taylor!”
She hustled to the truck, started it, and backed onto the beach. She peeled away toward Joey, who was now more than a hundred yards upriver. She drove with her left elbow hanging out the window, like a farmer driving down a country road.
The other girls and I stood alone on the beach. “That is so effing cool,” I said. “How far can he go?”
“The beach ends after a half mile or so,” Hope said.
With Taylor gone, I finally had time to get to the bottom of some things.
“So,” I said as Bristy and Hope began skipping rocks onto the water. “I know Taylor can’t know you two smoke weed, but does she know Finn?”
“She knows who he is and what he does,” Hope said. “Everybody in our school knows what he does.”
“Do you think she’d be pissed if she knew I hung out with him?”
“Probably not,” Bristy said.
I wondered, “Probably not” because Taylor didn’t like me as more than a friend and didn’t care what I did?
Only one way to find out.
“Ladies,” I began, “I just need to come right out and ask this. Does Taylor like me? Like, like me like me?”
Bristy and Hope dropped their rocks and looked at each other gravely, like I’d just asked a question they didn’t want to answer. They stayed silent, apparently hoping the other would be the first to speak.
Finally, Hope did the honors. “Sorry, Eddie. Don’t waste your time. She doesn’t — ”
“Stop,” I said, cutting Hope off. I could feel all the blood drain from my face. I didn’t want to know why. At all. Every word of Hope’s explanation would be more painful than the last. Nothing is more demoralizing than finding out the girl you like doesn’t like you back. Nothing.
I was right after all, I thought. Taylor is too smart and too hot for me. Out of my league.
“I have to go,” I said. “Tell Taylor I forgot about something I have to do.”
“But, Eddie — ” Bristy said.
“I don’t want to hear it.”
I turned toward Taylor’s house and started walking. I wanted to run.
* * *
I peeled out of Taylor’s driveway and started driving around in the orangey twilight, not knowing where I was headed. I drove the dirt roads through neighborhood after crappy little neighborhood, in a daze. My body was so numb, I couldn’t feel my right hand when I grabbed the stick to switch gears. I kept driving, and driving, and driving, for who knows how long, as thousands of tiny rocks pinged against the FJ’s undercarriage.
I drove onto what I thought was a new road, but then I recognized the kids riding their bikes as the same group I’d seen
a few minutes before. I was just on this road, I thought.
I continued driving, searching for a road I hadn’t already traveled. I couldn’t find one. I couldn’t just roll on down some country highway, the way I could back home. The town felt like a hideous song, stuck on repeat. I couldn’t go anyplace new.
Finally a dirt road I’d followed just ended. No street sign warned me of a dead end or a washout or anything. I jammed on the brakes. My head almost hit the steering wheel when the FJ’s front tires sank into doughy tundra. I’d arrived at the edge of a vast expanse of nothingness. So vast, I could practically see the curve of the Earth. I shifted into reverse and accelerated but didn’t move. The FJ was stuck.
I couldn’t drop the vehicle into four-wheel drive without locking the front hubs. When I got out to do it, I became paralyzed by the world around me. The faint sound of a dog pack howling on the other side of town filled the cool, calm night air. The sky was on fire. A small flock of white tundra swans flew so close overhead, I could hear their wings whooshing. The scene would have stupefied anyone.
At that moment, I should have appreciated the beauty and tranquility of the world around me. For the rest of my life, I might never again experience the peacefulness and purity of the dazzling sights and sounds before me. Yet I felt only loneliness and isolation. I felt like I was all by myself, lost at sea, clinging to a scrap of driftwood.
I turned my head east, toward the empty abyss of tundra. Along the horizon, I could barely make out the profile of the highest peaks of the Kilbuck Mountains. Somewhere beyond those mountains, five hundred miles away, my friends were having fun in Anchorage.
They were there, and I was here. In Kusko. For another eight months. Broke. With no chance at Taylor. Completely alone.
“Kusko sucks,” I said out loud, to no one. “I want out of here.”
CHAPTER 11
TRY SOME BEAVER
I sat at my desk Monday morning, unmotivated as a stubborn mule. Dalton sat at his, wearing his tan Carhartt overalls, trying to close an ad deal with a new Polaris dealership in Anchorage.
“Don’t wait another month,” Dalton said to the business owner on the phone. “Get into people’s heads now, before your competitors start running their dividend ads.”
Dalton kept talking, and I kept sulking. I was supposed to be writing a story about a break-in at Kusko Clinic, a small family practice on the east side of town. On Saturday night, one or more hoodlums had busted open the back door and swiped five thousand dollars’ worth of Valium, OxyContin, and other prescription meds.
Instead of writing the story, I perused travel search engines for flights to Anchorage, and visited Yute Cargo’s website to calculate shipping costs to get my truck back there. The combined cost for both was north of thirty-five hundred dollars, which I knew I couldn’t come close to ever being able to afford. But it was fun to dream.
Dalton said into the phone, “Thanks again, I’ll get you into the next issue,” and hung up.
“Did you hear that, Eddie?” Dalton asked excitedly. “I just scored a four-month contract of half-page ads. They’ll run every week until the dividend rolls out.”
Whoopee, I thought.
“Awesome,” I said, trying to act happy. “Does that mean —”
“It means we’ll bump up to sixteen pages for the foreseeable future. So you’ll need to crank out a few more stories every week.”
I didn’t hesitate a millisecond before asking, “Can you pay me more?”
Dalton appeared too thrilled by his sale to be annoyed by my question.
“Now I can afford to start flying you to villages,” he said. “You can shoot all the photos you want to fill up the extra pages — as long as the photos are good, of course.”
After five months in Kusko, I’d finally get to experience the adventure of traveling to some of the farthest reaches of the planet, of visiting parts of Alaska few people ever got to see. Maybe I should’ve been excited, but I sure didn’t feel excited. I felt cranky and sour. I still felt trapped. I wanted to be done with Kusko.
The text Taylor sent me the night before only reinforced my misery. Bristy and Hope had told her about our conversation — how they told me I had no shot and how I took off.
“I never meant to lead you on,” Taylor wrote.
I responded, “No worries. Good luck with the spelling bee.”
She sent me a frowning emoticon followed by, “I’d like to talk to you.”
I didn’t want to have the let’s-be-friends convo. “I’m good,” I wrote. “See you around.”
I deleted our text thread, and Taylor’s number, from my phone as Dalton stood up from his desk to leave.
“I need to run some errands,” he said. “Try to finish that story by noon, then I’ll take you to lunch.”
“At Delta Delicious?”
“They have a new lunch menu. I hear it’s not bad.”
* * *
“Done yet?” Dalton asked, walking through the door and onward to his desk.
I was still bogged down in the story. It was supposed to be six hundred words and include a photo, which together would fill half a page. I had barely written three hundred words and still hadn’t shot the pic.
I shook my head and stared at my computer screen, trying to think up an excuse. When he asked why not, I lied and told him I’d gone to Kusko Clinic to shoot the photo of the busted door, which ate up some time. I crossed my fingers, hoping he wouldn’t ask to see the photos.
Dalton sat at his desk, checking his email. “Got another story for you,” he said. “Sheriff Buzz Berger just emailed me a nice lead.”
“What’s the deal?”
“Big marijuana bust in the village of Tuntutuliak, forty miles southwest of here.”
Dalton forwarded me the email. The sheriff detailed the events of the bust and made note of the fact that marijuana prices in villages had never been higher, leading dealers to take risks they normally wouldn’t take. At the end of the email, he added, “Don’t print that part about the fuckin’ prices, though. I don’t want to tempt any more dealers. Security at Kusko Airport is shitty enough as it is.”
I’d seen Buzz at the courthouse but had never met him formally. In writing he sounded unprofessional.
Dalton sat up from his desk. “Let’s go eat,” he said. “Just make sure you finish the marijuana and clinic stories before deadline tomorrow.”
I hopped into Dalton’s truck and we headed to Delta Delicious.
During the drive, I couldn’t stop thinking about the weed story. It had given me an idea.
Granted, it was a crazy idea. But given the depths of my agony, crazy seemed like a step upward.
* * *
I pulled up to my place at around eight o’clock. I’d spent all afternoon and early evening willing myself to write the two stories Dalton had assigned, shooting a photo of the busted door at Kusko Clinic after he left the office. I barely finished the clinic piece and would have to get up extra early to pound out the weed story. Writing while depressed isn’t easy.
I looked over at Finn’s house and saw a rusty old pickup in his driveway. I decided to wait a minute. I didn’t want to show up unannounced and make his customer jumpy.
I pulled out my phone, intending to kill a little time by sending a text to R.J. But I saw that my dad had texted me earlier. He’d written: “When do your finals start?”
I didn’t know how to respond. Part of me wanted to come clean about bombing out and moving to Kusko. It’s not like throwing a pissed-off father into the overflowing river of shit I’d created could make the river rise any higher. I’d already screwed myself hard enough.
I stared at my phone. “Two weeks,” I wrote. “Burning the midnight oil. Studying hard.”
I got out of the FJ and walked to Finn’s house as the rusty pickup in his driveway backed out. I made an
effort not to look at the driver, and when I knocked on Finn’s door, he opened right away.
“What up?” he said with a grin. He wore a camouflage smock, and the smell of cooking meat poured out around him. “Come on in, brother. Try some beaver. I just finished slow-roasting a meaty one I trapped.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” I replied.
“Don’t knock it, man,” he said. “Beaver is rich and oily but real tasty. I think you’d like it.”
He led me in and motioned for me to sit down at the kitchen table. From the kitchen counter he grabbed a plastic plate that supported a heap of beaver meat the size of a full rack of ribs, then took a seat across the table. He used a fork and knife to cut hunks of meat clinging to the dead animal’s spine. I watched him take a huge forkful, shove it into his mouth, and chew, chew, chew.
“I have to ask something,” I said. “Did you sell weed to that dude who just left?”
He nodded as he scooped in another forkful.
“How much?” I asked, then waited for him to swallow.
“An eighth,” he finally said.
“How much did you charge?”
“Seventy-five bucks. But this is really good stuff. Normally it’d be sixty.”
Finn stood up and walked to the slow cooker on his kitchen counter. He used a ladle to scoop carrots and onions onto his plate. He sat back down.
“So,” I continued, “what would you charge for an ounce of the sixty-dollar stuff you normally sell?”
Finn said around four hundred for an ounce. When I asked how much an ounce would sell for in the villages, he said double or more.
“So,” I said, “in theory, you could sell an ounce in a village for nine hundred?”
“Yeah, I guess. But I don’t have the balls to — ” He paused. I saw the light bulb turn on. “Wait a minute, Eddie. I see where you’re going with this. I don’t know, man. That’s a slippery slope.”
“Dude, I’m about to be flying to a different village almost every week,” I said. “Dalton finally has money to start sending me. Airport security won’t think to check my bags because they know I’m a reporter.”